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Ashutosh Kumar February 28, 2020
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How can Blockchain impact Healthcare Industry?

Blockchain technology is a flourishing technology that has helped various industries due to its vast applications and secured mode of functioning.
The adoption of blockchain technology has helped to solve various issues that include efficient management,
streamlined processes, and security. Blockchain has a wide range of applications and uses in healthcare industry. The ledger technology can facilitate the secure transfer of patient data or medical records, has the potential to manage the medicine supply chain and can prove handy for medical research.

Possible ways in which blockchain will impact the healthcare industry are:

Efficient data sharing

Transparency & Monitoring

Supply chain management

Collaboration between various parties

Unification of medical records

Handy for medical research

The main objective of this article is to present a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which Blockchain technology can be used by the healthcare industries to get the most productivity.

How can Blockchain technology impact Healthcare Industry?

Blockchain holds a lot of power to transform the healthcare industry and it will make the healthcare sector swift and secure than ever.

Efficient data sharing

Efficient data sharing across crucial healthcare providers has the potential to offer many benefits such as cost-effective treatments, accurate & to the point diagnosis and a better cure for various diseases. By utilizing the Blockchain technology, various stake-holders in the healthcare providers can work simultaneously in a shared network that too with ensured data security, data uniformity, and data integrity.

Transparency & Monitoring

Blockchain, as a decentralized system is hackproof and prevents every single copy of data from getting compromised.

The decentralized system can improve healthcare management systems by providing constant and powerful monitoring. The decentralized ledger allows for documenting the transactions in a record and people with the access token can view it. This not only eliminates the errors but also enhances transparency while reducing the time and costs.

Supply chain management

Another key issue with the healthcare sector is that supply chain management is both insecure and wearisome. The whole process includes the manufacturing of drugs in the warehouse centers and then distribution to wholesale distributors and then the drugs are made available to the retailers which finally are sold to the customers.

The major threat with the whole process is that counterfeit drugs can enter the cycle with the utmost ease.

Implementation of Blockchain technology in Healthcare can solve these issues much efficiently. It can help assist the manufacturers to keep a track of all the ingredients used thereby ensuring that the ingredients used are as per the medical guidelines. Also, the improved traceability provided by the distributed ledger technology one can easily find the source of counterfeit drugs and thus can help the healthcare and pharma organization to get rid of counterfeiting.

Collaboration between various parties

The kind and quality of collaboration among various parties determine the success of any healthcare initiative. But the process is itself lengthy and drawn-out. Imagine if collaboration can be made extremely seamless?

That’s where Blockchain comes into action. The distributed ledger technology can make the collaboration of various parties extremely seamless thus promoting innovation in the healthcare sector.

Unification of medical records

The data stored in Blockchain is nearly impossible to manipulate. It can ensure the integrity of all the medical records, whenever the data is stored in the blockchain. It will provide its absolute proof as to the data stored can’t be changed.

This will be a huge positive point for the healthcare units as the medical records are crucial for medical as well as for the legal point of view.

The latest cryptographic features facilitate the data authenticity by providing a digital signature which also offers the security of patient’s data. This will, in turn, help the healthcare units to get access to the most updated version of the patient information and will ensure that there is no chance of data leakage of patients.

The mismatch and duplication of the patient’s data are also not rare in the healthcare sector. The available electronic health record(EHR) is also not reliable as it brings new ways to manipulate data.

With Blockchain the entire data is hashed to a ledger which makes it easier for single patient identification.

Handy for medical research

The researchers with the help of digital signatures can get access to the patient’s data, their treatment and the type of disease. This will allow them to effectively study the impact of a specific treatment over a massive section of the population. This type of research helps to improve the treatment process and methodology for those sections of the population.